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Long-time readers know that I have long championed a generalist rather than specialist approach to navigating uncertainty. It is my belief that experts by their very nature live in silos and tend to view most developments through the narrow lens of their specific microscope. This leads to depth of expertise, but the flip side of that dynamic is that specialists tend to lack breadth of perspective. They tend to overlook the proverbial “big picture.”
The most effective approach to navigating uncertainty, I contend, is to look across silos and connect dots rather than focus on generating dots. My second book, Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence, is about how experts should be consulted but not empowered (“Keep Experts on Tap, Not on Top” is the title of one of the chapters). My third book, The Making of a Generalist, shares how I arrived at this approach to addressing uncertainty.
Throughout all my writing over the past twenty years, I have consistently tipped my hat to ancient Greek philosopher Archilochus who noted, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” This logic was later expanded by Isiah Berlin in a book titled “The Fox and the Hedgehog” that explicitly suggested hedgehogs see the world through one lens while foxes draw on a diversity of experiences and perspectives. I’ve always thought of myself as a fox, and even shared some of my thinking in a 2012 TEDx talk entitled “The Power of Foxy Thinking.”
All of this came to mind this past week when news broke that the United States might have finally brokered an end to the Israeli-Gaza War that has been raging for the past two years. Against the odds, and most expert opinion, American leaders appear to have struck a deal that ends hostilities and—at least temporarily—puts the region on a path towards peace.
The deal is particularly surprising given the team that pulled this off is, from one perspective, a bunch of rank amateurs. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump is the only man in U.S. history to be elected president without having first served in another political office or the military. Further, Steve Witkoff, the Administration’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, was a property developer that Foreign Policy declared had “failed spectacularly” as a diplomat. Rather than being a hindrance to progress, could Trump and Witkoff have been empowered through the power of fresh eyes?
Could expertise be a liability? Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki has noted that “the mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt and open to all possibilities.” Critics have called Trump’s approach to global negotiation an “amateur hour” but I can’t help but ask, is being an amateur always a bad thing? Rather than being a hinderance, could the lack of experience have been an asset?
For years, the foreign policy expert class assumed that peace in the Middle East was dependent on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and an expert consensus emerged that it required a two-state solution. Many graduate students, think tanks, and journals treated the necessity of a two-state solution as an immutable article of faith. Until that faith was rocked by an alternative possibility.
Many on Trump’s team were free of the “expertise” gained via international affairs graduate programs or professional foreign affairs careers. Instead, they seem to have focused on the reality that Arab countries were more concerned about Iran than Israel. This insight proved to be a strong foundation on which to build better relations, and was clearly the negotiating logic that led to the Abraham Accords. And by some accounts, those better relations were crucial to this week’s deal. The focus on Israel as the issue was so deeply embedded in expert thinking that it took an “amateur approach” to shift the focus to Iran. The foxes saw what the hedgehogs missed.
If Abraham Lincoln had his “Team of Rivals,” Barak Obama had his “Team of Rivals 2.0,” and Joe Biden had his “Team of Buddies,” Trump has assembled a “Team of Foxes.” Their diverse backgrounds and generalist approaches continue to confound the hedgehogs, whether on the economy, tariffs, or international affairs. And while it may be too early to judge the results of their policies, the approach has been a huge success in getting all of us to think differently about tough problems…and with respect to navigating uncertainty, that’s a big win.
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VIKRAM MANSHARAMANI is an entrepreneur, consultant, scholar, neighbor, husband, father, volunteer, and professional generalist who thinks in multiple-dimensions and looks beyond the short-term. Self-taught to think around corners and connect original dots, he spends his time speaking with global leaders in business, government, academia, and journalism. He’s currently the Chairman and CEO of Goodwell Foods, a manufacturer of private label frozen pizza. LinkedIn has twice listed him as its #1 Top Voice in Money & Finance, and Worth profiled him as one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Global Finance. Vikram earned a PhD From MIT, has taught at Yale and Harvard, and is the author of three books, The Making of a Generalist: An Independent Thinker Finds Unconventional Success in an Uncertain World, Think for Yourself: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence and Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst. Vikram lives in Lincoln, New Hampshire with his wife and two children, where they can usually be found hiking or skiing.
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